In the late ’90s and early 2000s, the Tamagotchi was inescapable. The digital pet created by Bandai was brilliant in how it gamified annoyance: You had to feed, entertain, scold, and clean up the digital turds of a creature that only lived on an LCD screen, and millions of human beings were convinced this was fun. And now, anybody buying into this year’s silly fad can finally put the silly fad of yesterday on their wrist!
In what was inevitable in retrospect, Bandai Namco has updated their Tamagotchi app for the Apple Watch. Now you can feed, pet, and otherwise care for the little monster directly from your wrist. Not even putting away your phone will be a respite! Your Tamagotchi will follow you until the end of time or your phone dying, whichever comes first!
Ironically, despite the fact that you’re using a complex $350 device to do this, you’re probably better off with the $20 LCD piece of crap you can amazingly still buy. Popular Science notes that third-party app restrictions means your Tamagotchi just sits there while you stuff its face or try to play with it, which would seem to remove the entire point of raising this pixel blob. Isn’t the idea it tries to please you, so you won’t see what happens when it fills its pen with turds?
Anyway, the app is just a dollar from the Apple store, so if you don’t already have it, all the joys of digital pet ownership can be yours on the cheap. The only difference between this and a real pet is that a dog won’t use your expensive wrist band to call you and insist to be fed. Maybe a cat will. Cats are like that.
(Source: Popular Science, Apple)